DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00425.x Review Article The Bergen Electronic Edition of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass David Stern Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: Text and Facsimile Version. The Bergen Electronic Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Windows Individual User Version. Text and Facsimiles, £1100.001VAT; Text Only, £700.001VAT. Network Version, Text and Facsimiles, £2500.001VAT; Text Only, £1750.001VAT 1. Introduction Wittgenstein’s Nachlass consists of over 20,000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts. Because Wittgenstein published barely 25,000 words of philosophical writing during his lifetime—the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and a very short conference paper—the papers that he left unpublished have played an unusually large role in the reception of his work. The posthumous publications, almost all of them based on materials in his Nachlass, contain well over a million words. As the Nachlass as a whole contains approximately three million words, one might estimate that roughly a third of Wittgenstein’s writing is in print. However, as much of the material that was not edited for publication consists of early versions, rearrangements, and other source material for the previously published material, one could argue that considerably more than a third of his Nachlass has already seen the light of day in one form or another. On the other hand, because Wittgenstein never copy- edited any of these papers for publication, each of the posthumous books and papers called for substantial editorial decisions about the content, and how to present it. Consequently, almost all of the twentieth-century publications from the Nachlass were extensively edited, often with little or no indication of the relationship between the source texts and the published material, and so one could argue that very little of the Nachlass has been available in print. 1 A number of more recent publications, such as the critical- genetical German language edition of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2001) and the German-English scholars’ edition of the Big Typescript (Wittgenstein 2005) are sophisticated critical editions. They make use of the information provided in the Bergen edition to present not only the final state of the text, but also such matters as undecided variant wording, marginal marks, and the different stages of revision, by means of footnotes and the use of an elaborate apparatus. The ‘Vienna edition’ of the manuscripts and typescripts from the 1929 to 1932 period (Wittgenstein 1993a, 1994-) however, is the product of a separate editing project. The Bergen electronic edition, freed from the constraints of print publication, provides much more detailed information about each page of the manuscripts and typescripts that make up the Wittgenstein papers. The organizing principle is Georg Henrik von Wright’s European Journal of Philosophy 18:3 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 455–467 r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.